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Can you believe its December already? As the weather becomes colder and the days shorter, it is important to find ways to stay active and healthy during the winter months. Today’s bulletin will focus on creating incentives to stay active and eat healthy through the use free mobile/iOS apps that will not only track your progress, but create a more enjoyable and innovative experience for you to remain healthy.

First, The Nike Training Club is a great personal trainer app, ranging with timed workouts from 15 minutes to 45 minutes. The workout program includes detailed instructions and audio support for over 100 featured dynamic drills, all designed to increase body strength, flexibility, agility, and stamina. Plus it tracks your training progress and workout history. Ab Workouts is an app focused on abdominal exercises with animations and a trainer’s voice guiding you through the exercises. The app includes a food list providing you with what foods are the healthiest to keep you fit.

Just because the temperature drops it doesn’t mean you can’t bundle-up and go for a run this winter! MapMyRun GPS is a great running app for any walker, jogger and competitive runner. This unique app tracks and logs your distance, pace, and calculates the total amount of calories burned. Nike+ Running and RunKeeper are also comparable apps and a great way to track your runs on a treadmill or outdoors. All of these apps allow you to build a running community by sharing your runs and routes with friends and coworkers.

So what should you eat after a workout to refuel your body properly? There are plenty of free educational healthy food apps that offer recipes and advice on eating. Foodily Recipes is one great source and is the world’s largest social recipe network. This healthy food app will allow you to find and share delicious and most importantly healthy recipes. Additionally, Fooducate is another great educational app. This app allows you to scan barcodes of products giving you a nutrition grade range from A to D. This is an informative app that will aid you in making smarter educated choices for food intake.

Exploring ways to be inspired and motivated is the key for staying healthy and fit, especially during the colder months. NCRPA and I challenge you to find a way to incorporate these mobile apps, or more, among your department. Whether that is connecting among coworkers through discovering new running routes or sharing healthy recipes you have discovered. Strength is in numbers when it comes to reaching a common goal! Whether it is with your peer group or your community sharing and supporting a common goal to increase the opportunities to become more active and health conscious is one we can all get behind. Most importantly, don’t think of staying healthy as a burden but an enjoyable learning experience that improves the overall health of our communities and state!

If you have any programing ideas or ways to incorporate mobile device apps among your department then please email us or submit them on the wellness site here (colleen@ncrpa.net,http://www.ncrpa.net/?Wellnesssub) For every idea submitted you will be entered to win a cool NCRPA T-shirt!